DRD Team
drdteam.org forum

Imported from the old forum:

Most of you that want to get graphics for your upcoming Masterpiece-of-a-Weapon-Modâ„¢ will probably want to use models from recent shooters. There's nothing stopping you. However, please follow these tips to make sure your rip works well:

1. Rip at a low resolution. The more resizing and resampling you have to do, the more jagged edges are going to appear on your model. 640x480 is optimal in most cases, but if you can go as low as 320x200, do so.
2. Adjust the gamma correction. Either in your game or while you're working with the screenshots, you need to adjust the contrast of the gun so it doesn't appear too light or dark in Doom.
3. Use model viewers whenever possible. If you rip from a game like Quake 2, Quake 3, or Half-Life, there are model viewers all over the place. All you have to do is load up the view-model and position it accordingly - then you can use whatever tools are available to get every last detail of your gun's animations and stuff.
4. Look at a highly contrasting surface in game. If you don't have a modelviewer available (which may be the case for most games), it's best to rip while looking at a contrasting surface so it's easier to trim the gun from the screenshot.
5. Stand in a well-lit area if possible. You don't want your rip to be too dark or shadowy, because it'll look like crap in game.
6. Kill the HUD. Whether it be by screen size, hud level, or opacity settings, turn the HUD off so it's not in the way.
7. Always rip the guns yourself if possible - don't rely on Gamespot, Gamespy, IGN, 3DGamers or whatever to provide your screenshots.
8. If the rip doesn't come out too well in the Doom palette, use your paint program's "Adjust Hue/Saturation/Lightness" option, whatever it may be called, to adjust the colors to be closer to those that Doom has.
9. When all else fails color-wise, and you absolutely must have the base colors in your gun in game, make a new palette based on the Doom palette to make your rips with.
10. Make sure the colors stay good when you convert to doom's 256 color VGA pallete. Make sure any artifacts this can cause are removed, adjust and fix any messed up skintones, etc.

Feel free to suggest more tips.

-When ripping from an emulated video game, be sure to check for GameShark codes. Among interest are no clipping (a lot of skies are a pure color) and all weapon cheats.
-Don't forget: if the game has a slowdown feature (allowing you to fire your weapon in slow motion) abuse it.

Is it possible to rip weapons from Dark Forces 2 or Jedi Outcast or Jedi Academy?

Also what tools would you suggest for the process, is there a graphical guide anywhere etc?

All of the above are possible - just follow the guidelines above. There isn't a graphical guide anywhere, and I suppose there's probably a reason for that.

Humongous bumpage

I kinda disagree. The edges of weapons and textures may look jaggy if ripped at 320x200 (raw rip, no resizing), if the game has no antialiasing. You should rip at 640x480 and resize it ONCE to 320x200, using bicubic, bilinear or smart resizing (under no circtumstances should you use "pixel resizing"!) which should 'soften' your gun to a nicer look.

Oh, another rule. To get rid of antialising you should either place your weapon on a new layer over a black background, and then merge the image and fill the black with cyan, though it may leave slight black outlines (which looks bad). The best method is to, well, remove AA over outlines of your gun by hand. To keep an eye of them fill the cyan background with a less saturated colour, like grey or brown, and it'll make green/blue buggers pop out so you can erase them.

Concerning the background: If your weapon is mostly one color (like the majority of weapons in Counter-Strike are greyish), set the background color as close to the weapon's color as possible (a few shades darker though). Size the weapon down, use magic wand to select the background (OR, alternatively, it might be easier to use a point-to-point selection tool).

I don't know about tools for DF2 and JO, but here is link to development kit for Jedi Academy. I don't have any experience with it, so you need to figure it out yourself. The SDK contains: shader editor/viewer, model viewer, script editor, Icarus compiler, source code of multiplayer and necessary documentation.

http://download.bonusweb.cz/4e10513ba44 ... sdk_mp.zip